The Oakland Table

An Explanation

In the early 90's, Jerry Brown settled in
Oakland. There, he started the We The People Foundation, a non-profit
organization dedicated to strengthening the practice of democracy and the ability
of people to shape the places where they live. Toward that end, the foundation
promotes disciplined study, conversation and civic engagement--all in a spirit
of openness and mutual trust.

Brown had invited an old friend, Ivan Illich
(1926-2002), together with his circle of friends and long-time collaborators,
to be his guests twice a year for six-week periods. They presided over a series
of public lectures, seminars, reading groups and conversations where people
had opportunity to rethink their own experience of place, neighborhood and city.
This program, formerly called "Research by People" because of its
participatory character, is now described as The Oakland Table. The change
is meant to emphasize that this collaboration requires presence in an
atmosphere of hospitality rather beyond mere academic inquiry. What we want
to understand is how the exercise of citizenship can become possible in an age
of global controls and systems management of people.

In September 2000, a group of collaborators and friends of Ivan Illich
gathered around Jerry Brown's Oakland Table in order to reflect on the
distinction between place and space. During the various discussions
in the auditorium and library, it became clear to us that we live in
a world of two heterogeneous spheres. Late 20th-century political, social
and urbanistic practices are based on the latent assumptions of homogeneous
space. Planning and management treat city space as a matrix that pre-dates
human presence; as an empty container of architectural objects. These
objects - housing units, roadways, parks, office buildings or 'zones'
- are constructed as blueprints on a drawing board and incorporate the
characteristics of abstract space: They lack orientation, atmosphere,
closeness and traces.

A place, in contrast, arises through the mutual
commitment to live where we are; it is the result of dwelling activities.
Even though it is possible to identify characteristics that distinguish
all places from space, each place is unique. For this reason we refuse
to speak of place in the singular, but rather of a place or of places
in the plural. What we call "The Oakland Table" cannot exist in space.
Jerry Brown's hospitality, and the different guests from Oakland and
its environs, contributing their experiences and standpoints, created
a unique atmosphere and a sense of being in a place.

The second Oakland Table was April
21st through May 26th, 2001. At that time we focused on the erosion
of the most fundamental arts of being in a place: We explored the history
of hospitality. We looked at the recent loss of hospitality for the
old, the ill, and the crippled; for children, and for those who waste
away or who die. And we examined how the institutional provision of
services undermines the sense for hospitality in the home, and facilitates
ways of inhabiting spaces unfit for neighborly aid, family care, common
mourning and mutual commitment.

Since the middle of the 20th century, experts make
their living by convincing people that, due to so-called progress they
are no longer capable of taking care of each other in any of the many
ways different cultures have been cultivating for centuries. New professionals
such as educators, obstetricians, vocational advisors, marriage psychologists
and dietary counselors succeeded in transforming citizens into needy
clients who become dependent on professional services in ever more areas
of their life. For those activities that once took place at home, that
once created a place, "needy" clients are now moved to institutions
where they consume professional inputs to satisfy their needs. Homes
and neighborhoods desiccate; they are transformed into hygienic garaging
units where no one is born, is sick or dies anymore.

The critique of professional behavior, status,
power and latent symbolic functions originated in the sixties and is
still beholden to the expert model of the professional, dominant after
WWII. "Science says..." or "Doctor knows best!" are catch-phrases to
sketch this figure of the expert. But we argue that the age of this
kind of professional dominance is coming to an end.

Nowadays it is counselors and facilitators who
burgeon much, as experts and professionals a generation ago. They induce
their clients to make crucial decisions that were of strictly professional
competence in the past. These facilitators see themselves as defenders
of the freedom and autonomy of their clients. They consider it their
task to persuade patients, students, couples, investors and job-seekers
not to get managed but to manage themselves. They claim that their services
are needed to "empower" their clients to make so-called autonomous decisions
between fixed alternatives.

Medical counselors coax their patient to take responsibility
for their own optimal functioning. They provide quickie courses in interpreting
test results, such as blood pressure, cholesterol level and antibody
counts; in evaluating the corresponding risks; and, finally, in choosing
between different courses of actions according to a risk profile. The
action might be to take pharmacological treatment, lose weight, undergo
an operation or move to a healthier neighborhood. In an analogous way,
career counselors bring people to view themselves as a human resource
that must be efficiently managed; hygienic counselors make them grasp
themselves as immune systems, and educational counselors to select their
curriculum according to the ability profile resulting from a set of
tests.

At the Table talks in April and May 2001, we took
a critical look at the beliefs evoked when facilitators introduce statistical
and technogenic critters into the deliberation of people. We want to
questioned the assumption that the art of dwelling and mutual commitment
can be mediated through counselors and facilitators. Facilitating self-management
is an attempt to put a human mask on space. Instead of liberating us
from the assumptions and needs experts formerly imputed to us, it generates
the illusion that we can regain the art of dwelling and being hospitable
if we would only learn to supervise ourselves in the way statistical
and technogenic critters demand.